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Record numbers of refugees from Fidel Castro’s failed communist experiment are streaming into the United States — not just across the Florida Straits, but especially over the U.S.-Mexico border. During the last three months of 2015, more than 12,000 Cubans knocked on our southern door. This year’s migration is on pace to double the previous high.

In stark, resentment-sowing contrast to other migrants from Latin America, Cubans are greeted in the U.S. with cash, access to welfare and a path to citizenship. That’s all thanks to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. But now many politicians are asking whether, during this period of Washington-Havana thaw, it’s time to revamp this Cold War-era preference.

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A new study from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth mapped student loan delinquency rates and found that areas of cities with higher concentrations of African-Americans and Latinos had the highest delinquency rates.
Read more at http://redalertpolitics.com/2016/02/22/federal-college-loan-program-hurts-minorities/#TfG6QD4ctkm0IGLq.99

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In a recent letter addressed to Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), Obamacare chief Andy Slavitt said the federal government will “recover its fair portion” of funds in the event a failed Obamacare state exchange reaches a settlement with contractors.

Given that the federal government funded the overwhelming majority of state exchange projects with $5.5 billion in taxpayer funds, “fair portion” should be close to 100 percent.

But don’t hold your breath.

To date, recovery of the billions in wasted state exchange funds has been near non-existent, despite failed exchanges in Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Nevada costing taxpayers $733 million.

In fact, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, these four states have returned ZERO dollars to the federal government, and state exchanges collectively have so far returned just $1 million.

But the waste doesn’t end there, as “working” state exchanges including Vermont, Minnesota, Maryland, and Massachusetts have each misused as much as hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds.

Further, an investigation led by House Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) found that federal officials were unable to provide information on the long-term sustainability of remaining exchanges, and were unable to defend the four failed state exchanges.

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In the DOJ’s defense of the FBI’s request, they said that Apple’s refusal to comply “appears to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy.” That may be true, but the government is playing the same game. It looks like they are using the emotions around the San Bernardino incident to garner political support for a more strategic move against companies refusing to break encryption. They know this could set the precedent they need to strong arm industry players into either installing “backdoors” on encrypted devices or bending over whenever the FBI comes knocking.

So we have competing strategies at play: the enabling of security vs. the subversion of security. Which one were you taught in high school was the government’s side?

Read it.

Earlier today, I wrote about the scheduled hearing in a case brought by several left-wing organizations to block three states from taking measures to make sure non-citizens can’t vote in the upcoming presidential elections. The states received permission from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to proceed. The leftist outfits seek to enjoin the EAC’s order.

The Justice Department is, in effect, the lawyer for the EAC. However, it has chosen to tank the case. It “consents” to the motion to enjoin the Commission’s order.

They thought they had a sweet deal: Have a bunch of the Usual Suspect leftist anybody-can-vote groups to challenge a ruling that States can actually ask for ID, and then have the DOJ, supposedly defending the ruling, take a dive. But it didn’t work out that way.

Judge Leon also seemed taken aback that the Justice Department is not opposing the plaintiffs’ motion to enjoin the government. Leon called it “unprecedented” for DOJ to agree to a preliminary injunction blocking a federal official’s decision. “I’ve never heard of it in all my years as a lawyer,” the judge stated.

The same statement applies, I think, to any number of actions and positions taken by the Obama Justice Department under both Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.

Stalin once said that it doesn’t matter who gets to vote so much as who counts the votes; the Obama DOJ corollary to this appears to be that it doesn’t matter what the law says so much as who gets to enforce (or not enforce) the law.

With DOJ taking the plaintiffs’ side, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach took the lead in defending the proof of citizenship requirement imposed by his state. He also raised the conflict of interest argument (discussed in my earlier post) that stems from allegations that the Justice Department ghost wrote the original ECA decision, which went in favor of the leftist civil rights plaintiffs.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

My, what a surprise!

In a late Friday afternoon news dump before the President’s day holiday weekend, the Obama administration announced that it would pay out $7.7 billion to Obamacare insurers through the reinsurance program – including $1.7 billion in illegal payments. In all, the administration has unlawfully funneled $3.5 billion into this program.

For 2015 Obamacare reinsurance, the administration will pay out $6 billion raised from a fee on private health insurance and an additional $1.7 billion that under federal law belongs to the Treasury department. Indeed, the decision by the Obama administration directly violates section 1341 of Obamacare which explicitly states “money shall be deposited into the general fund of the Treasury of the United States and may not be used for the [reinsurance] program established under this section.”

The Obamacare reinsurance program was one of three programs (together with risk corridors and risk adjustment) created to hide the true costs of coverage on the exchange and prop up insurers by redistributing funds from different groups to Obamacare exchanges. In the case of reinsurance, this took the form of a $44 assessment on each individual with private health insurance.

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The Chinese military is able to detect U.S. F-22 stealth fighter jets, according to a Chinesemilitary expert in an interview for a CCTV program.

Several fighters from East China Sea Fleet patrolled around the Air Defense IdentificationZone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea after receiving orders that unidentified trackingoccurred near the ADIZ on the morning of Feb. 10, according to a report on PLA Daily onFeb. 11.

The report said that helicopters from a carrier-based helicopter brigade along with thecarrier patrolled around the area and missiles were set on fighters on duty at nearbymilitary airports which were prepared to take off for combat. However the report did notdisclose which country the objects belong to or other relevant information.

Some Western media guessed that the unidentified objects might be the U.S. F-22 stealthfighter jets. Chinese military expert Yin Zhuo told Asia Today that if the unidentified objects appearing near ADIZ over the East China Sea turned out to be F-22 from the U.S.,it would be a good opportunity for China’s military to practice its ability to find, identify and intercept stealth fighters.

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In order for humanity to one day colonize Mars, researchers must first find a sustainable crop to grow there. However, Mars isn’t the most hospitable place for plant life, which is why NASA scientists are currently in Lima, Peru attempting to grow potatoes in a simulated Martian environment.

The experiment, which began in January, is taking place at Lima’s International Potato Center (CIP), a nonprofit research center aimed at achieving food security, according to a press release put out by CIP in December. The researchers are growing 100 different varieties of potatoes and subjecting them to a slew of tests to see if any of them can hold up to Martian conditions.

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When public college foundations ask for donations, they tell a familiar story: state funding is tight, and donors can help support the community. Their dollars fund scholarships, buildings, academic programs. And almost always, the foundations’ money goes directly to the colleges they support.

But in Rhode Island, Governor Gina Raimondo has other ideas.

It started with a trip to Switzerland. Raimondo wanted to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the University of Rhode Island Foundation offered to cover up to $10,000 of her travel costs.

During the same week of her request, when Raimondo wanted a state innovation office, another public institution’s foundation, the Rhode Island College Foundation, agreed to create it. The office’s one employee — a chief innovation officer — will make $210,000 a year and serve on the governor’s cabinet.

“It’s kind of a step out of the box in terms of the traditional ways to support a college,” said Edwin R. Pacheco, the Rhode Island College Foundation’s associate vice president for college advancement and external affairs.

To quote a famous Doonesbury cartoon: ‘That pension fund was just sitting there.’

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In Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971, written with Mickey Rose), it is the phase in which the revolutionary Esposito achieves power in the fictional Latin American backwater of San Marcos. The power promptly goes to his Esposito’s head. Esposito starts issuing proclamations such as this one: “From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now… 16 years old!”

Bananas is a comedy that plays it for laughs. Barack Obama is about as funny as cancer. We probably entered into the Esposito phase of Obama’s presidency long ago, around the time Obama started rewriting unambiguous provisions of Obamacare on his own say-so.

Now we seem to be reaching peak Esposito.

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Ethanol backers struck first, filing a lawsuit January 8, claiming that the EPA erroneously set the numbers based on demand rather than supply and that the EPA overreached in its interpretation of the RFS.

Then last week, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers also claimed the EPA used flawed methodologies in setting the most recent numbers. “Despite the agency’s best efforts, certain aspects of the final RFS rule still run afoul of the Clean Air Act,” said Chet Thompson, president of the AFPM. “This rule further confirms that the RFS program is dysfunctional and that the only real solution is full repeal by Congress.”

The EPA is one of the reasons why Richard Nixon will burn in Hell for all eternity.

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If automation-induced unemployment becomes a problem (or if the chattering class can convince voters that it is a problem, which is a different thing entirely), then this is the obvious policy recommendation from those who look first to the government to solve every ill.

Of course, nobody will have the bad grace to mention that constantly increasing the legal ‘minimum wage’ merely encourages increased automation.

My, what a surprise!

Leaked documents show that the California high speed rail is reversing course—quite literally—and changing construction plans on the first 250-mile stretch of track. The new plan will now connect the Central Valley to the Bay Area—not Los Angeles as originally planned.

After all, who would want to go to Los Angeles?

News of the route change comes in the same week consultants projected a $260 million increase in additional costs for the first 22-mile leg of construction—which amounts to a five percent increase in price for a project that has yet to lay a single foot of track.

Your tax dollars at work.

California Assemblyman David Hadley (R-South Bay) told local radio station KFI 640 AM that the new route potentially goes against a provision in the high speed rail legislation that says the train must first connect to Los Angeles. He stated the language was added to ensure Southern Californians didn’t foot the bill for a train that could very well end up becoming a regional transportation project.

Which appears to be exactly what is happening. But when did government employees ever worry about following the law?

The route change is only the latest in a line of broken promises made by the California rail authority. Voters approved the project with a $33 billion price tag—that has since doubled to $68 billion and could go even higher. Construction is already over two years behind schedule and the state has still not disclosed how they plan to raise the $53 billion in additional funds to complete the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco track.

Promises? We don’t need no stinkin’ promises….

The sad part is that the problems with the high speed rail project were entirely predictable.

And predicted. But nobody ever listens when it comes to spending taxpayer money.

Read it.

The U.S. government has yet another intelligence scandal on its hands. It’s an old complaint, one that became common during the Cold War. In short the president and his staff do not agree with intelligence reports relating to ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and have frequently (and quietly) ordered them modified to conform with the more optimistic assessment the president wants. In response dozens of intelligence analysts and managers began complaining more and more, often to the media, that the intel reports the government was passing out were false but no one had the guts or clout to shut down this censorship program.

This sort of thing has long been a problem with intelligence agencies and it became acute during the Cold War. The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) is responsible (since the late 1940s) for collecting, analyzing and reporting intel any problems with accuracy. The accuracy of this work is a matter of life and death because these reports, passed on to the Department of Defense and Congress are used as the basis for making all sorts of decisions. Keeping all this intel honest is a primary mission of the CIA. But the CIA track record is not all that great. There have been other problems as well, like the increasing likelihood of being found out.

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President Obama’s Department of Education has been waging a seven-year war against for-profit colleges. So it’s a lesson in the self-interested ways of the modern regulatory state to see a veteran of that war now seeking to profit from education.

…

The University of Phoenix was once educating close to half a million students but last month reported an enrollment below 180,000. And with Apollo recently trading below book value, it might be a real bargain—especially for an investor betting that the next Administration might go easier on for-profit colleges. Now comes news that Apollo will be sold to several private equity firms. And coincidence of all coincidences, after the sale closes the company will be run by a former top official in the Obama education department, the same outfit that led the attack on Apollo.

Gee, funny how that works.

To summarize, an Obama pal is the day-to-day boss of a department that succeeds in destroying 90% of the value of a politically targeted company. Then he leaves government, buys the company at a fire-sale price and announces that the problems that attracted so much negative government attention are ending—just in time for a new Administration that might not hate for-profit education as much as this one. Government mediation sure can be a lucrative business model.

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The 1998 Travel and Transportation Reform Act, which mandated the use of travel cards, ironically intended to simplify government employees’ purchases. But since each government agency manages its own employees’ cards, there is no uniform oversight of misuses. Over the years, whistleblowers shed light on the corruption of the travel card, agency by agency.

The most recent culprit is the Pentagon. From July 2013 to June 2014, Pentagon employees spent nearly $ 1 million at casinos using their travel cards. Also, employees spent more than $96,000 at “adult entertainment establishments.” Out of the 4,000 individual transactions, only 41 received punishment and a “letter of reprimand.”

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The elites know what they want: a trackable record of every transaction that happens on planet Earth. Those who stand in the way or object are just facilitating “bad guys.” Some evidence this week from Harvard University, where Peter Sands, president emeritus of Harvard, has issued a new paper on the topic of “Making it Harder for the Bad Guys: The Case for Eliminating High Denomination Notes.”

Who cares? It’s all just paper, and equally worthless, no matter what number is on the face. It’s only worth something because some government stands behind it with a gun — and even that doesn’t always work, as Zimbabwe and half a dozen South American kleptocracies have found out.

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Yesterday a judge sided with the FBI, ordering Apple to not exactly create a back door to bypass its encryption, but pretty damn close. The judge has ordered Apple to assist the FBI by making it possible to bypass or deactivate the auto-erase function that deletes the contents of the phone after too many failed password attempts; to allow the FBI to electronically submit passcodes rather than manually; and to eliminate any delays in the system between password attempts. The demands are clearly designed so that the FBI would be able to try to brute force the password by attempting every possible number combination. (You can read the full order and some technical analysis at Techdirt here).

…

What Cook doesn’t say but should be extremely obvious is that even if Apple creates only one of these devices for the government, the feds will most certainly try to backwards-engineer the tool to figure out how to replicate it. We have seen every single surveillance authorization given to the federal government abused and expanded to snoop on citizens for inappropriate reasons and without due process. There’s no reason to believe the same thing won’t happen here and that the justification for breaking encryption won’t be defined downward from “terrorist who killed 14 people” to “suspected drug dealer” or what the FBI defines as a domestic “extremist.”

If history tells us anything, it is that, when it comes to the ‘slippery slope’ argument, every government employee comes dipped in butter and ready to roll.

The Devil roams about the world like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith.

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Then there is the model that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have pursued — with astonishing success. For them, politics is the family business. There is no distinction between business careers and political careers. Holding and serving in public office provides a platform from which they can monetize experience, connections and prominence. And then they use the wealth gained through, say, speaking engagements and media tours, to lay the groundwork for the next campaign. Electoral office, business, wealth, and public service, all meld together seamlessly.

We got your 1%, right here.

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Wherever you stand on the subject of global warming, pay close attention to one under-reported aspect of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Paris Agreement. I am referring to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which is a financial mechanism intended “to assist developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices to counter climate change.” According to the current estimates, developed countries will be obliged to contribute up to $450 billion a year by 2020 to the GCF, which will then “redistribute” the money to developing countries allegedly suffering from the effects of global warming.

Lo and behold, Zimbabwe’s government-run daily “newspaper” The Herald repored that “Southern Africa is already counting the costs of climate change-linked catastrophes… In Zimbabwe, which has seen a succession of droughts since 2012, a fifth of the population is facing hunger… feeding them will cost $1.5 billion or 11 percent of… the Gross Domestic Product.”

No doubt Robert Mugabe, the 91-year-old dictator who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980, is salivating at the prospect of some global warming cash. Beginning in 2000, Mugabe started to expropriate privately-held agricultural land. The result of what what is euphemistically called “land reform,” was a monumental fall in productivity and the second highest bout of hyperinflation in recorded history.

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The University of Missouri’s face of campus fascism, communications professor Melissa Click, has been furiously back peddling and apologizing for assaulting a student and calling for “muscle” to physically remove a student journalist from a public space. This campaign to save her job might have worked, had not new police body cam footage shown her in a separate incident screaming at a police officer to “get your f—— hand off me!”

She reminds me of that American chick who got run over by an Israeli bulldozer while training ‘Palestinian’ kids to hate America. (I can never remember her name.)

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The government has made one last attempt to screw over a victim of an IRS bank account seizure. The screwing began in December of 2014, when the IRS — despite stating it would not perform forfeitures if there was no clear evidence of wrongdoing — lifted $107,000 from convenience store owner Lyndon McLellan. This was yet another one of the IRS’s “structuring” cases, predicated solely on the fact that multiple deposits under $10,000 were made. ($10,000 triggers automatic reporting to the federal government.)

After the IRS announced it would not be pursuing questionable structuring seizures — thanks mainly to several rounds of negative press — it still continued to pursue McLellan’s case, despite IRS Commissioner John Koskinen telling a Congressional subcommittee that this was exactly the sort of case the IRS would no longer be pursuing.

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Two Escondido, California, high school students—ages 16 and 18—could see their whole lives derailed because they committed the crime of keeping fishing supplies in cars they parked on school property.

The elder teen, Brandon Cappelletti, had three knives in his car: the remnants of a family fishing trip. The knives were used to cut lines and filet fish. The younger teen, Sam Serrato, had a pocketknife in his glove compartment. His father had left it there.

Both teens are facing expulsion. Cappelletti, a legal adult, could serve jail time if convicted of weapons charges, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Who doubts that, if they had been black, they would be free and facing no punishment?

Steve Sailer understands the dialectic.

One of the weirder contradictions of contemporary dogma is the belief that race does not exist combined with the government’s obsession with counting everybody by self-identified race. If race doesn’t exist, you’d think that, say, the Obama Administration would be under a lot of pressure from its supporters to dump the racial/ethnic classification system. Strangely enough, it never seems to occur to all the True Believers to ask their friends running the federal government to change the system.

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As the Antiplanner noted last week, Los Angeles is not the only region experiencing declining transit ridership. Another is Washington, DC, where a recent report from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA aka Metro) revealed that ridership has fallen to the lowest level since 2004. The agency’s financial situation is so bad that WMATA’s number-two executive has resigned and, ominously, the agency has hired a bankruptcy attorney to help it deal with its problems.

Once again, politicians’ fondness for trains over automobiles will cost the taxpayers millions.

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If you look closely at the numbers in the Obama budget proposal, you find that Treasury economists figure that U.S. multinational companies with profits overseas are exploiting the tax code even more than previously estimated–which means even more money would be raised by changing the way U.S. companies’ international profits are taxed.

Oh, so is Obama suggesting that we bring our corporate tax rates in line with other developed nations and encourage American companies to bring that money back home rather than scrambling around for tax shelters overseas? No, of course not.

The Obama plan would require companies to pay that 19% minimum rate to all governments combined, not just the U.S. The taxes that U.S.-based firms pay to foreign governments would count toward the minimum. The less they pay in taxes abroad, they more they’d have to pay to the U.S.

Rather than addressing the basic problem, the administration is trying to nail the doors shut so the livestock can be more easily slaughtered.

It’s hard to say definitively what’s behind this.

No, it’s not. The U.S. government is determined to bleed its businesses as thoroughly as it can, and this is the only area in which appealing to how foreign nations do things doesn’t seem to carry any weight.

It looks like U.S. companies are increasingly skillful at finding low-tax countries in which to book their profits while, for their part, foreign governments are reducing the rates at which they tax business.

And the administration’s actions merely increase the incentives to be even more clever in finding loopholes. The more cornered a victim feels, the more desperate the attempts to escape. And I suspect that companies like Apple can afford better attorneys and accountants than the IRS can.

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As the Super Bowl weekend excitement fades and the Panthers have left California with a loss, at least one player takes a second hit. Since out-of-state athletes are levied with the ‘Jock Tax’, Cam Newton will pay $101,360 on his bonus of $51,000- effectively making his loss one championship ring and roughly $50,000. That’s a bad day.

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It seems like so long ago, but really isn’t. In 2013, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the IRS had in fact been directing extra scrutiny to broadly defined right-wing “Tea Party” groups as they applied for various forms of tax-code recognition. In fact, Obama forced out the acting commissioner of the agency and pledged publicly, “I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but particularly the IRS given the power that it has and the reach that it has in all of our lives.”

Paul Caron, a Pepperdine University academic who runs the always interesting TaxProf blog, recently celebrated the 1000th day of the scandal, which he argues (convincingly) has never really been covered or investigated fully. After Obama’s first big statements, interest drifted away for the most part and even the president’s bald acknowledgements that something was rotten at the IRS started to be walked back.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

In a new USA Today column, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who’s been linking to TaxProf for the past 1,000-plus days, sums up the social implications of the IRS scandal:

It’s not just that evidence overwhelmingly points to the IRS having been weaponized in an effort to neutralize Obama’s Tea Party opposition. It’s that ordinary Americans can look at this and conclude that there’s no reason to follow the law if they can get away with breaking it since the people in charge of enforcing the law clearly regard it with contempt.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Obamacare: The gift that keeps on shivving.

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Somehow, when the Founders were setting up the country, I suspect that having the Federal government dictate to a local city how much they pay their police was not the sort of role they had in mind.

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And here I thought he was the President of the United States. Good to know for whom he’s actually working.

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Oklahoma faces a $900 million overspending problem, and that number could reach as high as $1 billion with falling gas prices and lower tax collections in December. Gov. Mary Fallin’s solution is $910 million in “recurring revenue,” an evasive term for tax hikes.

Pledge, schmedge — when money runs short, a politician will always pick raising taxes over cutting spending.

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President Obama has unveiled his last budget proposal, which calls for $4.1 trillion in spending for FY 2017. In the final year of his presidency Obama is by definition a lame duck. With Republicans in control of Congress–even though it doesn’t always seem like it–he is the lamest possible duck. As always, Obama’s final budget purports to cover the next ten years. But since Obama will be gone in a mere eleven months, why should anyone care what he wants ten years from now?

Investor’s Business Daily points out that 70% of Obama’s budget consists of writing checks to individuals. It’s a sign of the times: the principal purpose of the federal government is one not found in the Constitution, redistributing wealth, most often from the young and middle-aged to the elderly.

Obama’s budget is a fantasy in several respects. It calls for programs that have no chance of being enacted. It relies on economic growth projections that will not be realized. It proclaims goals–stop the Earth’s climate from changing, as it has been doing for millions of years!–that cannot be achieved by any federal action. In one respect, however, it is not a fantasy: it would transfer trillions of dollars from those who earned the money to Democratic Party constituencies, like “green” energy scammers. At bottom, Democratic Party policies are motivated by a cold, hard realism.

And the chattering classes wonder why people are voting for Trump.

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The taxpayers of Barre Town, Vermont, just spent $83,750 settling a lawsuit that should never have happened. The money is going to one mother who was banned from her child’s school last year. Her offense? An off-handed comment she made about a 2006 school shooting.

Katie Sherman had been fighting with the school district already, asking them to give her special-needs son the accommodations his Individualized Education Plan (IEP) requires. According to The Barre Montpeliar Times Argus, the dispute goes back to November 2014, when the school first issued the IEP. Sherman expressed concerns and then filed an official complaint in January 2015.

She enlisted the help of advocacy group Vermont Family Network (VFN) and later commented to VFN’s Martha Frank that she could understand how Christopher Williams, an Essex, Vermont, man convicted of killing two elementary school teachers, had been “pushed to the edge.”

Little did Sherman know the Supervisory Union would use that comment as justification to issue a no-trespass order, which kept her from going to meetings to complain about the IEP problem. The order also prevented her from voting in elections, since her son’s school is also her polling place. In July, Sherman sued, claiming the order violated her constitutional right to vote as well as her right to participate in public meetings.

There must be a special stupidity test that prospective government employees, especially school administrators, have to fail before they’re hired on.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed a regulation to prohibit conversion of vehicles originally designed for on-road use into racecars. The regulation would also make the sale of certain products for use on such vehicles illegal. The proposed regulation was contained within a non-related proposed regulation entitled “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Fuel Efficiency Standards for Medium- and Heavy-Duty Engines and Vehicles—Phase 2.”

The regulation would impact all vehicle types, including the sports cars, sedans and hatch-backs commonly converted strictly for use at the track. While the Clean Air Act prohibits certain modifications to motor vehicles, it is clear that vehicles built or modified for racing, and not used on the streets, are not the “motor vehicles” that Congress intended to regulate.

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Of course. We can’t have all those businesses growing and creating value; why, they might even create jobs, and where would Democrats be without their dependent underclass?

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One of the biggest victories of the copyright maximalists was the successful adoption of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, implemented by the DMCA in the US, and the Copyright Directive in the EU. Its key innovation was to criminalize the circumvention of copyright protection mechanisms. That strengthens copyright enormously by introducing yet another level of legal lockdown, and thus yet another powerful weapon for copyright holders to wield against their customers. But as Techdirt has reported, the anti-circumvention laws are now being used to prevent people from exploring or modifying physical objects that they own.

The DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules not only strengthen an old monopoly — copyright — they create a new one. Because it is forbidden to circumvent protection measures, only the original manufacturer or approved agents can legally repair a device that employs such technologies. Motherboard has an interesting profile of efforts by the wider repair industry to dismantle that new monopoly before it spreads further and becomes accepted as the norm.

This may seem obscure but it’s not — these sorts of monopolies are how governments stifle individual freedom, not to mention technical innovation and economic progress. For an example, read Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law.

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Obamacare: The gift that keeps on shivving.

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The University of California (UC) announced Thursday in a press release that it has officially allotted the first $5 million in loans for distribution to illegal immigrant students through the California DREAM Act.

Approximately 3,500 illegal students in the UC system will be granted financial aid this year though the 2014 bill, which will serve students at all nine UC campuses.

My, how special.

UC president Janet Napolitano called the DREAM program an investment for the students, the state, and nation as a whole. Students residing in the U.S. illegally in California are eligible for state and UC aid, but not federal aid.

A name famed in song and story.

Alexis Moran, a third-year Hispanic student at UCLA, told Campus Reformthat by being exclusively available to illegal immigrants, these resources would not only hurt “law abiding citizens who are of all ethnicities including Hispanic, but they are also promoting and sponsoring people who are breaking the laws of our state and country.”

As if the Crust gave a shit about law abiding citizens.

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Imagine you run a barbershop and you learn that someone is planning to open a rival business down the street. What do you do?

One option, of course, would be to compete the old-fashioned way by offering lower prices or better service. But the old-fashioned way is hard! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could keep your competitor from setting up shop in the first place? There’s evidence that a growing number of businesses in the U.S. are trying to do exactly that. And while that may be good for them, it’s bad for entrepreneurs, workers and the economy as a whole.

On Tuesday, a Senate subcommittee held a hearing on “occupational licensing” laws, which require government-issued licenses to perform certain types of work. Such laws have long existed for doctors, lawyers and others in highly skilled professions, but they are increasingly spreading to low- and mid-skill jobs as well. A White House report last summer found that occupational licensing requirements have increased fivefold since the 1950s, covering more than a quarter of all workers in 2008. Cosmetologists, tree trimmers and even interior designers need licenses in some states.

The only way to prevent competition is via government action, and that is the major source of (a) special interest legislation and (b) corruption in government, not just in America but around the world.

Read it.

My question is, what business is it of a professor what terms students use, so long as they accurately express the meaning the students intend?

In the syllabus for her “Creativity In Context” class — a required course for any student pursuing a minor in Innovation — UF professor Jennifer Lee informs students of her four paragraph long classroom “communications policy” that she says will enforce “ethical conduct” in the classroom.

There appears to be something in the bottled water supplied to Florida colleges these days.

Mark Steyn scratches his head.

Aside from the Marco Rubot malfunction, the most dismal aspect of Saturday’s Republican debate was the sight of supposed conservatives competing in their enthusiasm for making women sign up for “selective service”. For non-Americans, I should explain that registering for “selective service” – as in military service – is something all young men have to do upon turning 18, so, in the event that the draft is ever reinstated, they’ll have everybody’s name in the big database. As with many aspects of the vast bloated federal bureaucracy, it seems a largely redundant exercise: I mean, between Social Security numbers, the IRS and the US Census, don’t they have every 18-year-old male in the database already?

Oh, Mark, Mark, Mark. When will you ever learn? The purpose of government isn’t to provide a service efficiently; it’s to hire and pay government workers. And if that means paying more than once for the same thing, they’re okay with that.

Be that as it may, there’s now a proposal to make the young ladies register for selective service, too. And naturally the Republican candidates were falling all over each other to say how hot they were for the idea. For my own part, I’d like to go back to the days – barely within living memory now – when America won wars, rather than figure out ways to lose them more diversely. But, as usual with Republican pandering, it seemed to me a bit behind the curve.

Indeed. Time to Get With The Program.

Read it.

Jackson, Mississippi, City Council member Kenneth Stokes is calling for an investigation of a local gun dealer who posted a sign saying that people who vote for Stokes or President Barack Obama are too stupid to own a gun. “If this gun dealer feels that it’s legal for him to display negative images of the president of the United States, keep in mind that he must have some kind of license,” Stokes said. “We’re asking the attorney general of the United States to do an investigation and let’s see whether the rules and regulations have been violated.”

Note that he wasn’t interested in violations of the Constitution. ‘Free speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ free speech!’

Never was a sign so thoroughly validated.

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St. Louis residents no longer have a football team, but that doesn’t mean they will get to stop paying for one. While the Rams won a vote in mid-January to relocate to Los Angeles, St. Louis taxpayers will still be responsible for making $144 million in debt and maintenance payments for the Edward Jones Dome.

Lewis Reed, the St. Louis Board of Alderman president, has asked the NFL for money to help pay off the debt, but he seems unaware of how the multi-billion dollar league operates.

As Reason has reported in the past, stadium financing is one way the NFL holds cities hostage—either pay for a state-of-the-art facility or lose the prestige of having a professional football team. This has resulted in often lopsided stadium deals that leave cities (and their taxpayers) burdened with much of the debt.

Not that taxpayers got all that much to say about it; politicians just LOVE major league teams.

Read it.

Much like the Mafia, the government is always on the lookout for new ways to steal money.

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Hint: When you raise the price of something, people buy less of it.

Hiring at restaurants, hotels and other leisure and hospitality sector venues slowed markedly last year in metro areas that saw big minimum-wage hikes, new Labor Department data show.

Wherever cities implemented big minimum-wage hikes to $10 an hour or more last year, the latest data through December show that job creation downshifted to the slowest pace in at least five years.

Liberals fighting for a dramatic increase in the minimum wage have insisted that there would be a negligible impact on job creation. Though the data are preliminary and overly broad, Washington D.C., Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago seem to be finding out that the reality isn’t so benign.

Demonstrating once again that the ‘reality-based community’ isn’t.

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The ‘progressive’ campaign to cancel anything after 1900 proceeds at taxpayer expense.

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The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the most expensive military program in the world, is even more broken than previously thought. The jet can’t tell old parts from new ones, randomly prevents user logins into the logistics information system, and trying to eject out of it will likely result in serious neck injury and maybe death. A Pentagon office is warning that the plane is being rushed into service.

In short, it’s a piece of crap, as I have been saying all along.

Read it.

At a Congressional hearing on the Flint water crisis, Republican Rep, Jason Chaffetz vowed to “hunt down” emergency manager Darnell Earley and drag him to Washington, D.C. to explain why he did nothing while citizens drank poisoned water for months.

“We’re calling on the U.S. Marshals to hunt him down and give him that subpoena,” said Chaffetz.

Darnell Earley is, as you might suspect, a black Democrat ‘public administrator’.